Thursday, January 31, 2013

Staunton, January 31 – Twelve
defense witnesses said last week that the Karelian government’s extremism charges
against Ivan Moseyev, leader of the Pomor national movement, were absurd, with
Pyotr Kirpita, the head of the Union of Slavic Peoples, testifying that he was “surprised
that such a show trial is taking place now” in Arkhangelsk.

Moseyev’s
case has attracted the most attention not only in Russia but internationally
because Karelian officials first charged him with high treason for supposedly
spying for Norway, an accusation they have dropped or at least suspended
because of outrage by the Norwegian government and Scandinavian activists.

But
it does appear to be part of a more general effort in Karelia and other places
outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg, where there are more civic activists and
Western journalists to take notice, to test the waters concerning just how
citizens of the Russian Federation will respond to greater repression.

And
that makes Moseyev’s latest comments especially noteworthy. Officials, he
says, “are
doing everything they can to put together a credible case, but to most people
it is obvious that this is ridiculous" because “when someone on the
internet calls for the Pomors to be shot, the prosecutor doesn't notice
anything, but for an innocent phrase I used I get nabbed.”

Officials have “chosen a
selective application of Article 282 of the Criminal Code” with the
transparently obvious aim being “to discredit me and stop my efforts to
revive Pomor culture and to put a stop to studies of the Pomor people,”
something Moseyev has pioneered as director of the Pomor Institute at the
Northern Federal University.

Staunton, January 31 – The city
government of St. Petersburg, in support of its deparment for work with religious
groups, has purchased on a single-source contract the entire print run of a
book that advances racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Western views and that
constitutes the kind of “provincial obscurantism” one wouldn’t expect in
Russia’s northern capital.

While Petersburg has been the place
of “scandal after scandal” in recent months, Aleksey German, Jr., a film
director, writes in his blog on Echo Moskvy today, it is “difficult to
understand,” regardless of one’s political leanings, how such offensive views
could thus be given a kind of official approval there (www.echo.msk.ru/blog/agermanml/1002020-echo/).

St. Petersburg’s “Fontanka”
newspaper broke the story a week ago when it reported that city officials had
bought for 250,000 rubles (8,000 US dollars) the entire print run of Orthodox
Petersburg historian Yury Mikhaylov’s “The Moral Shape of History” in order to
hand it out to religious groups there (www.fontanka.ru/2013/01/24/153/).

Trained as an engineer and then a
psychologist, Mikhaylov relies heavily on religious literature and presents his
views in a far from academic manner, the paper said, noting that the author
felt this decision of city officials to purchase and thus give sanction to his
ideas constituted “an exceptionally positive” development.

As the paper pointed out, however,
most people would question that, given that Mikhaylov says that the white race
is superior to the black race, that the Jews and the West have always worked
against Russia, and that the ideas of the Renaissance and Enlightenment are a
threat to Russians, the last “God-bearing” people and the defenders of “the
Third Rome.”

“Our
Motherland,” Mikhaylov says in his book, may be partially “divided” but it has
not been “humbled” and is “building up its strengths for a dawning renewal.” It
thus constitutes “the last bastion of resistance to the Anti-Christ,” and
consequently, the outcome of Russia’s struggle will define the future not only
of Russia but of the entire world.

The
Slon.ru journalist offers more than a 1,000 words of quotations from the book
the St. Petersburg city officials plan to distribute, including passages about
“sodommizing Judaism” in Europe, “’the superiority’ of Aryans over ‘cursed’
Negroes,” “the devils of Western civilization,” and humanists and democrats as “religious scoffers
and perverts.”

That some people at the margins will
always believe such patently absurd and offensive things is an unfortunate
reality, but that government officials at any level and in any country would
promote them in this way is a tragedy, one that people of good will in Russia
and elsewhere can only regret and condemn in the strongest possible way.

Staunton, January 31 – Despite spending
more money on facilities and infrastructure for the 2014 Sochi Olympiad than
any host country has ever spent for such a competition, Moscow currently has no
business plan concerning these facilities and infrastructure will be used after
the Games are concluded, according to a Moscow analyst.

In an article on the “Svobodnaya
pressa” portal today, Oleg Gladunov says that the Russian government is on track
to spend 43 billion US dollars for the Sochi competition, three billion dollars
more than Beijing spent when it hosted the Olympiad in 2008 and thus vastly
more than any country has spent on any games ever (svpressa.ru/economy/article/63827/).

Three things make this lack of a
plan especially disturbing, he says. First, Moscow’s expenditures for the games
continue to grow. Second, Vladimir Putin has blocked the auditing agencies of
his own government from tracking this spending. And third, Moscow is hiding the
real costs to Russian taxpayers behind false claims that private firms are picking
up the tab.

When Moscow made its application to
the International Olympic Committee in 2007, it said that Russia would spend
314 billion rubles (10 billion US dollars) on them, including 195 billion
rubles (6.5 billion US dollars) from the state budget.But those figures have increased every year,
Gladunov notes, reaching 950 billion rubles (30 billion US dollars) in 2010.

In June 2010, then Prime Minister Vladimir
Putin excluded the Sochi Games from the list of state programs, thereby “taking
away from the Finance Ministry and Economic Development Ministry the chance to
monitor state expenditures in Sochi” and opening the way for corruption.

In 2011, then-President Dmitry
Medvedev said spending on the Sochi Games would have to increase to deal with
the weather, and consequently, according to the available budgetary figures,
the Sochi Olympad will cost approximately 1.3 trillion rubles (43 billion US
dollars), with seven billion dollars spent on facilities and the remainder on
infrastructure.

Moscow officials have sought to deflect
complaints about costs by suggesting that most of the money comes from private
firms, but the firms who have supposedly invested the most get most of their
funds from the state budget and thus, in this case, are little more than pass
throughs.“There is practically no non-governmental
money in Sochi,” Gladunov says.

These officials have also
suggested that visitors to the Games will spend approximately 11 billion US
dollars and thus allow Moscow to recoup about a quarter of all spending. And
they argue that the infrastructure build for the games will be used for a long
time in the future.But as of today,
they have no clear plans for how that will happen.

What is clear, Gladunov says, is
that no one is going to be able to “return to Sochi the glory of an all-Russian
health resort, at least for the foreseeable future.” The hotels there will
likely cost ten times more than those on the Turkish coast, and consequently,
all but the wealthiest will choose to go there rather than to Sochi.

But what is most disheartening about
all this, Gladunov suggests, is the enormous amount of state funds – perhaps 20
percent of the 43 billion US dollars -- that is being corruptly diverted into
the pockets of those close to the Kremlin, if the testimony of one Russian
construction leader familiar with the situation is accurate (www.peredovoy.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=236).

Such figures and such obvious
official manipulation of them are certain to add to Moscow’s headaches as it
goes forward with what has become Putin’s signature event. Indeed, precisely
because this spectacle is so much on public view, it may prove an even bigger
problem for the Kremlin than worries about security at that North Caucasus
site.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Staunton, January 30 – A majority of
Russians today does not feel any sympathy for the Putin regime or is not prepared
to show any “active support” or “active opposition” to it, according to Lev
Gudkov, head of the Levada Center. Instead, they manifest a kind of “inert
indifference” about those in power and focus instead on their more immediate
needs.

This reflects the new reality in
Russia, the independent sociologist told Galina Mursaliyeva of “Novaya gazeta”
that they do not feel that they have any chance to “do something” about the
power structures and thus have little or no willingness “to participate in
political life” (www.novayagazeta.ru/politics/56510.html).

But
that widespred popular indifference to what goes on at the top of the Russian
political pyramid, combined with the willingness of some segments of the Russian
population to say they favor this or that act of the regime, however
repressive, provides “a foundation” of a sort “for the existing powers that be.”

Indeed,
Gudkov suggested, the Kremlin, provided as it is with reassuring data by
government-employed polling agencies who are prepared to skew the data to show
what they know is wanted, probably “does not understand” just how little real
support it has and remains “convinced that people need a great and powerful
state at any price.”

Mursaliyeva
began her interview by asking Gudkov to explain why his agency found so much
lower support for Putin’s law prohibiting the adoption of Russian orphans by
foreigners than did other agencies. He noted that “sociological agencies
working for the authorities put questions which push people toward the required
answer” and not to the truth.

Recalling
that the Levada Center found two years ago that “85 percent of Russians
consider that they cannot influence the situation in the country” and that this
represented “the complex of a prisoner,” the “Novaya” journalist asked if the
situation had changed and that support for protest had increased.

Gudkov
responded that the fundamental situation had not changed and that his center’s
polls show that “the absolute majority of people do not see any prospects [for
affecting change] and that they do not have any idea about the future of the country
or even about the future of their own families.”

With
regard to the political sphere, he continued, it has been “sterilized: there
are no discussions, no competition, and the entire sphereof the future has been
absolutely closed.”That has led people
to choose to focus on the present “without hoping for anything from the authorities”
and “without a future.”

The
“main trend” among Russians, Gudkov said, is a focus on the family and on “the
possibility of consumption: everyone want to eat better, dress better, and
acquire more. A consumer society has begun to appear, something that didn’t
exist earlier.” But that does not mean that a middle class in the Western sense
has emerged. It hasn’t.

That
is clear from the results of open-ended surveys about what are the most
important events of the year: Most name disasters, then various government
ceremonies, then corruption scandals, and only in fourth place are opposition protests.
“Social activismhas been suppressed, as has the meaning of a common life”
broader than the individual and his family.

Over
the past 20 years, Gudkov says, “people in the country of course hve begun to
live more confidently, but their horizons” have not expanded. A majority simply
doesn’t have any notion about even the mid-range future, living instead “from
paycheck to paycheck, from pension to pension with a very short horizon.”

Russia’s “consumer society” is thus quite different from its
Western counterpart, Gudkov says, because “there people owe their well-being to
their own efforts” and thus have reasons to be motivated about what they want
for the future.In Russia, such “motivations
are weak because one’s professional status is little connected with income and
way of life.”

“In
other words,” the sociologist continued, “salary or earnings depend to a grat
extent on one’s position in the power structures rather than on the quality of
your work.” That leads to a situation in which people by a three to one
majority view the authorities now as acting only in their own interests. As a
result, “politics is an absolutely discredited sphere.”

Russin
citizens at present do not want and cannot participate in it, he said, because
they do not feel themselves to be citizens,” the result of “the falsification
of elections, the increasingly harsh repression, ccensorship in the mass media,
and also fabricated cases against opposition leaders.”

About
30 percent of the population will say that they support harsh measures in order
to “preserve order and stability.” Most of these are the elderly and those who
live in the villages and today that is “Putin’s base.” Even when people
understand tht, he continued, they don’t want to personally get involved in
protests because they don’t believe such actions will matter.

Russians
are prepared for “moral protest,” but that is about attitudes not about
actions, Gudkov suggested.And without
such actions, it does not constitute a threat to the regime.What it does produce, however, is an
individual entirely suitable to be managed.Such an individual “doesn’t believe
anyone, wants to consume” and doesn’t care much about rules.

For
him, “corruptioin is not a moral problem, but a technical task of reaching
agreement about interests and thus a more or less effective mechanism of
interacting with the authorities.”Such
attitudes open that individual up to manipulation and certainly mean that he
will not protest against the powers that be.

Some
Russians – approximately one in five -- will say what the regime wants to hear,
that they want “a powerful military power.”But 78 percent say that what they want is “a comfortable live in which
in the first place are the interests of the individual, his well-being and the
opportunities for development.”

If
Gudkov’s analysis is correct, the Putin regime does not realize just how few
supporters it has, but at the same time, the regime’s opponents from whatever
part of the political spectrum currently have little chance to mobilize a
population little concerned with political issues for political ends.